Engineering education is the education of engineering and technology (EaT) content for pupils/students from primary school to university studies to be technologically literate. A technologically literate pupil will be able to apply declarative and procedural technological knowledge, have the skills to solve technological problems, and together with a positive and critical attitude towards engineering and technology content, also be able to think critically and make decisions about the use, conduct, and judgment/appraisal of technologies. A higher level of Technological Literacy (TL) has a decisive influence on further education in the field of technology and engineering, as well as on effectively coping with current technological change. This dissertation aimed to investigate how taxonomically differentiated problem-based repetition/reinforcement/treatment of learned learning content influences the increase in TL level. It was also found that knowledge, skills, abilities, and dimensions of TL were enhanced by the multi-stage model. In stage 1, this was done using a pre-prepared learning model consisting of tasks with a lower level of difficulty per taxonomic level. Stage 2, unlike stage 1, consists of tasks with a higher level of difficulty per taxonomic level. Stage 3 of the model involves repetition/reinforcement in the manner commonly used by teachers. A cross-sectional survey of attitudes towards EaT and TL was conducted as part of a pilot study to determine the state of TL at the beginning of EaT in grade 6 and at the end of regular EaT content in grade 8 of elementary school. We hypothesized that attitudes towards EaT may be crucial for the development of TL and we also examined the state of pupils' attitudes towards technology in grade 6 and grade 8. Moreover, we also sought to identify the possible predictive value of attitudes towards EaT for the achievement of knowledge, skills, and critical thinking and decision-making (CTDM) as dimensions of TL. The pilot study included grade 6 pupils (n = 86) and grade 8 pupils (n = 94). In this dissertation, we present the results that grade 8 pupils outperformed grade 6 pupils in TL. A significant difference was found in the CTDM dimension where grade 8 pupils scored higher than grade 6 pupils on the CTDM test. No significant gender differences were found in the performance on the TL, ability, and CTDM dimensions while on the knowledge dimension, a significant difference was found in grade 6 where female pupils outperformed male students. When measuring attitudes towards technology, we found that pupils seem to be aware of the implications of EaT on society and have a positive view of the importance of EaT in mainstream UN. Male pupils were more confident than female pupils that they were more capable than female pupils for EaT tasks or occupations. It is surprising that pupils do not rate EaT as difficult and that the attitude of grade 6 pupils towards interest in EaT is higher than that of grade 8 pupils. The results of the pilot study indicated that it is reasonable to implement new learning models to raise the level of EaT in grade 8 where the level of CTDM is statistically significantly higher than in grade 6 and could provide the desired effects of EaT instruction after the introduction of the new models. We carried out a study in five elementary schools in different-sized municipalities in different urban and rural areas in Slovenia. The participants were 8th-grade pupils of elementary schools (n = 242) and EaT teachers (n = 5). According to the research design, the sample was divided into three main groups where the experiment was conducted in two groups: (1) Level 1 (65 pupils; 30 females, 35 males) and (2) Level 2 (94 pupils; 46 females, 48 males) while the control group was one (83 pupils; 46 females, 37 males). The study investigated the TL level of 8th-grade pupils in elementary school (elementary school) and how much the pupils' TL level changed over one school year after the implementation of a newly designed instructional model to increase the TL level. We found that interdisciplinary approaches have a statistically significant impact on the acquisition of TLs with positive and large effect sizes. The two experimental groups are not significantly different. Surprisingly, there is also a statistically significant difference in pupils' resistance to EaT, namely in the Level 2 model where the content is of a higher cognitive level. This can be interpreted by the fact that pupils have not yet received instruction at levels higher than Bloom's taxonomy level 3 and are probably not yet able to explain the meaning of dealing with the material at higher taxonomic levels and probably expect more help from the teacher. We also explored correlations between the use of the newly designed learning model and their effects on individual TL dimensions. The findings and implications of the research will contribute significantly to the design of quality engineering education in elementary schools which will be geared towards enhancing pupils' TL. The scientific contribution of the Ph.D. thesis is the clarification of the key determinants of TL and a better understanding of TL for optimizing engineering education.
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